"Can you criticize Israel and be a faithful Jew?"

Of course. Many rigorously 'faithful' Jews believe that there can be no Jewish state until the Messiah comes. They don't criticize Israel - they merely refuse to recognize its right or reason to exist. Some of them live there.

That such questions can even be posed by reasonable people reveals the absurdity of conversation on this subject in the U.S. If all critics of Israel are either anti-Semitic or faithless Jews, then what is one to make of the many tens of thousands of vocal critics of Israel in the State of Israel itself?

I am saddened by the ongoing attempts to defame Jewish critics of Israel - not to mention Jewish anti-Zionists - by over-the-top rhetoric declaring that criticism of Israel is ‘un-Jewish’
or ‘antisemitic’.

However, I do think that all of this, together with the Mearsheimer-Walt debates and the Jimmy Carter affair, has had one unambiguously beneficial outcome: a more open and public conversation about Israel, the Israel Lobby, anti-Semitism (real and imagined) and Jewish stances vis-a-vis all of these than at any time since I arrived in the U.S. 20 years ago.

For what it’s worth, I see the hysteria surrounding the “Israel issue” in American life – and the shameful silence about what actually happens in the territories Israel occupies – as one more symptom of the provincial ignorance and isolation of the U.S. in world affairs.

We can continue assuring ourselves that the whole of the rest of the world is awash in inexplicable, atavistic, exterminationist anti-Semitism.

Or – in this as in other matters – we can re-enter an international conversation and ask ourselves why (together with an Israeli political class recklessly embarked on the road to
self-destruction) we alone see the world this way and whether we might be mistaken.

(Tony Judt is director of the Erich Maria Remarque Institute at New York University. His latest book is "POSTWAR: A History of Europe Since 1945.")